November 23, 2016

Berlinale Talents Turns 15 and Shows „Courage: Against All Odds“

Berlinale Talents turns 15 and shows “Courage: Against All Odds”

With its focus on “Courage: Against All Odds”, the 15th edition of Berlinale Talents takes on the significance of everyday bravery and fearlessness for today’s film professionals. 250 exceptional Talents and over 100 international experts and mentors will be invited to the six-day programme, held once again at the three venues of HAU Hebbel am Ufer from February 11-16, 2017.

Talents and experts will jointly explore moments of courage in the filmmaking process, from making daring choices at personal risk to pushing artistic, political or financial boundaries and venturing into unknown narrative worlds.

“Every time a filmmaker acts with courage, their step takes the true measure of a challenge. For the anniversary edition, Berlinale Talents will focus on these crucial points while celebrating a new generation busy making film with unshakeable optimism and against all odds,“ programme manager Florian Weghorn explains the theme.

The Berlinale Talents 2017 key visual showcases quotes that will sound familiar to many filmmakers from their day-to-day lives. With a little wink, the poster series calls on Talents, guests and Berliners to find the courage to interact with these messages during the festival.

New structures for more interaction

With the level of Talent experience continuously on the rise, Berlinale Talents has redesigned integral parts of the programme to strengthen the networking effects. Four major slots traditionally reserved for master classes have been replaced by a new series of interactive sessions and smaller encounters to better deepen the Talents’ knowledge and harness their expertise.

Berlinale Talents is also intensifying its ties with the European Film Market and the other industry activities of the festival. The re-branded ‘Talents Market Studio’ offers emerging sales and distribution professionals a better framework to discuss unconventional and collective marketing strategies and to test them directly on location at the ‘Talents Market Hub’ of the EFM.

2,711 emerging and already-established film professionals from 127 countries have applied for the 2017 edition and their applications are currently under review by an international selection committee. Berlinale Talents invites 250 Talents from the fields of directing, producing, acting, screenwriting, cinematography, editing, production design, film criticism, world sales, distribution, sound design and score composing.

Berlinale Talents is an initiative of the Berlin International Film Festival, a business division of the Kulturveranstaltungen des Bundes in Berlin GmbH, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, in cooperation with Creative Europe MEDIA, a programme of the European Union, Robert Bosch Stiftung, Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, the Federal Foreign Office and the German Federal Film Board.